The Mexica, continually dislodged by the small city-states that battle one another in shifting alliances, t finally find refuge on small muddy islands in the slowly shrinking Lake Texcoco in 1325 (or, according to some chronicles, 1345).

They establish a small collection of reed huts on the central island (at modern Mexico City), calling it Tenochtitlán and eventually connecting it to the mainland by causeways.

(The term Aztec is today a collective name applied to all the peoples linked by trade, custom, religion, and language to these Mexica founders.